THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: KvP on 12 Sep 2009, 13:13
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I have a question and I know y'all have it too.
Do you remember 9/12/2001? Think for a moment of how it was back then. The day after 9/11, we stopped thinking about Red States and Blue States. We stopped thinking about Republicans and Democrats. Do you remember when America came together? Do you remember that day? Do you remember when you were struck with a fear of brown people, an even more profound fear than you, as a right-minded American, already naturally possessed? Remember when you dropped a dime on your neighbors from India because they spent large stretches of the day indoors and never told you what they were doing? Remember that guy's name? Ali? What kind of a name is that? That didn't sound very American to you. You knew with a name like that he couldn't be grateful to you and your forebears who came to this land and made it into a Great Nation for them. Why didn't he love your country? Why did he wear that ridiculous hat? People who love Jesus don't wear silly hats. Remember Melissa, who had that accent? She said she was from Australia but now that America was under attack you weren't so sure if Australia was really our friend. Remember when we baked cakes? And went to church?
Why can't we have that again?
Join us, and together we can make it a reality again. (http://www.the912project.com/)
(http://bloggingexperiment.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/9-11-eagle.jpg)
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OBAMA WANTS TO LEGALIZE A DEATH PANEL TO KILL MY GRANDPA.
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dude I don't think that Eagle looks sad enough.
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stupid crying eagle picture
Whenever I see a picture with the tear coming out of the wrong side of the eye (and it is often, people who paint crying eagles are not smart folk) it annoys me so much. Damn thing looks like an anime characters who's nervous.
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dude I don't think that Eagle looks sad enough.
He's practically smirking. It's like he's hitting on some lady eagle, right? And then BAM, someone's cutting onions. Eagle's so damn cool he don't even blink. He just keeps on trying to fuck a lady eagle.
That's what America means to me.
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oh dear.
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Get outta here, you maple syrup chugging canuck. This ain't FOR you, okay?
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Puss-say
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September 12th, 2001 was my second day of high school. In religion class my friend Jenn bet me two dollars I couldn't guess what book she had the Bible open to. I guessed Amos and was correct. She never gave me the two dollars.
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Glenn Beck is a foul useless human being.
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James Beam says:
September 12, 2009 at 7:34 PM
Great principles, but obfuscated in the wording. Let’s rephrase :
1. I vote for a balanced budget only while the Democrats are in office. While the Republicans are in office, I didn’t object to squandering the Clintion surplus on tax cuts for the wealthiest, and a needless and damaging war with Iraq.
2. I oppose all tax increases… especially tax increases that might help us balance the budget as in #1.
3. I believe we should allow oil & gas corporations should have a free for all on mineral extraction in this country, despite environmental concerns, and despite the reality that the oil reserves left in this country are too negligible to have an effect on gas prices or our dependence on foreign oil.
4. I will not get my car washed by illegal immigrants. I will not hire illegal immigrants to clean my house. I will not buy fruit picked by illegal immigrants. I will not eat in restaurants with illegal immigrant busboys. I will not support a temporary guest worker plan to give some of these immigrants a legal way to work here. I will not allow illegal immigrants to buy health insurance under the Obama plan, because we’d rather just treat them for free in the E.R. like we do now.
4b The UN has no power over us. America can do no wrong and is above the law, and does not need to abide by the standards we expect of other nations.
5. America really is the greatest country on earth, and even with my head buried so far up my backside I can see that!
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America can do no wrong and is above the law hurr durr derp
Oh hey while I'm at it
(http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/2448/howironic.png)
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You're welcome
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I am such a loser because all I can do is.
Come on guys :c
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I actually had forgotten how bad Muse are until you just reminded me.
The new track sounds like Queen would sound to a baby having an abortion.
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I heard Glenn Beck say a Star Wars analogy to something about government or something else he hates for about 15 minutes straight on the radio the other day. It was one of the dammed nerdiest things I've ever heard from a right wing political pundit, and I was mesmerized. Then I realized I was still listening to Glenn Beck...
ALSO, I HAVE STRONG FEELINGS ABOUT NINE 'LEVEN.
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a baby having an abortion.
Can we all just focus on this for a minute?
A baby having an abortion.
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Man, freedom of choice means freedom of choice for everyone. Who are you to say that one person is allowed to have an abortion and another isn't just because of their age, or race, or religion, or wealth?
Only the OBAMA DEATH SQUADS can do that.
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Glenn Beck reveals his love for art analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWL-pfCao-U
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Can we all just focus on this for a minute?
A baby having an abortion.
I was well aware of what I was typing when I was typing it.
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Real America - a photo gallery (http://lookatthisfuckingteabagger.tumblr.com/)
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Glenn Beck reveals his love for art analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWL-pfCao-U
For fuck's sake, when did the Red Scare get a revivalist movement?
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Real America - a photo gallery (http://lookatthisfuckingteabagger.tumblr.com/)
(http://5.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kpvvrcfWR91qa3xbjo1_500.png)
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I think Van Jones stepped down because he had publicly signed a Truther petition. Chances are the petition was altered after signatures were collected (classic Truther move) but I think it was that more than anything.
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Real America - a photo gallery (http://lookatthisfuckingteabagger.tumblr.com/)
Little Capitalist Kid
I read that as "The Cure for Obama Communism is an Era of McCartneyism". I was a bit confused.
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I think Van Jones stepped down because he had publicly signed a Truther petition. Chances are the petition was altered after signatures were collected (classic Truther move) but I think it was that more than anything.
I had this weird moment at work the other night where I was shaking pretty badly cause I hadn't eaten anything and I was hungover and this guy says "hey you're a shaker aren't you"
I step back and ask him what the hell he's talking about
"you know, a shaker, you shake pretty badly"
anyway I proceeded to talk to this dude for a little while and apparently it's got a lot to do with vitamin B12 deficiency or something but my point is it was really weird to hear a problem I've had my entire life given a catchy name like that.
What I am saying is I wonder if 'truthers' ever get same weird existential moment when people call them that
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Glenn Beck reveals his love for art analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWL-pfCao-U
For fuck's sake, when did the Red Scare get a revivalist movement?
And it's thanks to smear like that that Van Jones stepped down. Your country insists on fucking itself and everyone else over.
Erm, just a second. There are a lot of folks within the system of our country that are trying to clear up the messes that people like Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter make. They aren't really representative of the whole. I'm not trying to get all confrontational about MY AMURIKA HURR, that's just a bit of a rude thing to say.
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A rude and ignorant thing to say.
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Every country fucks them self over at some point. Take Canada and Jean Chrétien for instance.
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Hey! I liked Jean Chrétien!
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9/11 just pissed me off because they aired the news instead of my cartoons.
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so... flying sure has sucked since 9/11 huh guys?
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Oh, you kidder. Damn it Tom
Anyway, apparently there's some stirrings over there that the "you liar" comment from Congressman whomever during Obama Satan's congress address must've been racially motivated and not because he's just a guy who didn't think out his conduct in Congress very well at all when an issue that he evidently strongly disagreed with was raised.
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(http://2.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kpvuxjHfo51qa3xbjo1_500.png)
holy shit I literally want this woman to die
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I think Van Jones stepped down because he had publicly signed a Truther petition. Chances are the petition was altered after signatures were collected (classic Truther move) but I think it was that more than anything.
I had this weird moment at work the other night where I was shaking pretty badly cause I hadn't eaten anything and I was hungover and this guy says "hey you're a shaker aren't you"
I step back and ask him what the hell he's talking about
"you know, a shaker, you shake pretty badly"
anyway I proceeded to talk to this dude for a little while and apparently it's got a lot to do with vitamin B12 deficiency or something but my point is it was really weird to hear a problem I've had my entire life given a catchy name like that.
There is a sign down the road saying there's a Shaker Community Meeting on Tuesdays. I guess you should go. Maybe it's like AA.
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so... flying sure has sucked since 9/11 huh guys?
Fuck yes. Goddammit!
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So let me tell you something about 9/11. On 9/11, at around a time, I was sitting in Math class. And the news was on and blah blah blah and suddenly one of the teachers runs in from another room and says "Is the news on? Are they watching it? This is the biggest thing that will ever happen in their lifetime."
I was, let me see, 15? Something like that. Here was a man, saying that in the next 70 or so years nothing more important than 9/11 will ever happen. I could chalk it up to the heat of the moment, except that whenever the last 9/11 was, 2 or 3 days ago, someone said the exact same thing, "9/11 is the most important thing that will happen in the lifetime of our children."
I still cannot fathom this statement. We could cure death in the next 80 years. We could end all disease, hunger, misery, poverty, foxnews, processed cheese, and crust on sandwiches, and 9/11 would still be more important.
9/11 is that important to these people. It all makes sense to me now.
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To be fair, it is a pretty big deal. It's like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or Vietnam, or World War II. Sure, we might cure death in the next 70 years but at the moment I have no problem whatsoever declaring 9/11 to be the biggest thing that's happened since I've been old enough to comprehend these kinds of things. For better or worse the events of that single day basically turned the entire world on it's head.
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The American reaction to 9/11 always perplexes me. Of course im making huge (huge) generalisations here but America accepted getting shat on after 9/11.
Whereas in Britain (not saying Britain is perfect or anything) the Blitz, and WW2 in general, made ordinary folks think 'to hell with all this fighting for my country if my country isnt going to look after me'. So we got healthcare and otehr aspects of the welfare state.
Milton Friedman said, “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change." It just seems that 9/11 brought about bad change for America, every disaster is also an opportunity, I cant help but think America missed out an opportunity to do something good. Instead it started two really unpopular wars.
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To be fair, it is a pretty big deal. It's like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or Vietnam, or World War II. Sure, we might cure death in the next 70 years but at the moment I have no problem whatsoever declaring 9/11 to be the biggest thing that's happened since I've been old enough to comprehend these kinds of things. For better or worse the events of that single day basically turned the entire world on it's head.
I think the point that saying 8 years later that it still will ultimately still be the most important thing to happen in this century or whatever shows an incredible lack of concern or foresight for the future.
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I think the point that saying 8 years later that it still will ultimately still be the most important thing to happen in this century or whatever shows an incredible lack of concern or foresight for the future.
But you know how sensationalism plays.
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The American reaction to 9/11 always perplexes me. Of course im making huge (huge) generalisations here but America accepted getting shat on after 9/11.
Whereas in Britain (not saying Britain is perfect or anything) the Blitz, and WW2 in general, made ordinary folks think 'to hell with all this fighting for my country if my country isnt going to look after me'. So we got healthcare and otehr aspects of the welfare state.
Milton Friedman said, “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change." It just seems that 9/11 brought about bad change for America, every disaster is also an opportunity, I cant help but think America missed out an opportunity to do something good. Instead it started two really unpopular wars.
Whereas we got new anti-terror legislation that vastly inflated police powers, a proposed ID card scheme and two really unpopular wars... er, what was the difference again? Also, Milton Friedman is basically a psychopath and one of the twentieth century's nastiest bastards.
For better or worse the events of that single day basically turned the entire world on it's head.
In what way?
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uh maybe by turning america into a bunch of terrified lunatics
I mean, moreso.
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I think the point that saying 8 years later that it still will ultimately still be the most important thing to happen in this century or whatever shows an incredible lack of concern or foresight for the future.
OK so in hindsight it seems kind of silly but you could probably credit a dude a bit of exaggeration when out of nowhere with no warning whatsoever 3000 people were killed by method of flying jets into some of the most well-known buildings in the world.
In what way?
Well you could probably start with all of the things you just mentioned and multiply it by the number of other countries who adopted similar measures (to varying extents).
On top of that, before September 11th 2001, how often do you think the average person had devoted any amount of time to considering terrorism? It was barely a blip on the radar. Hell, most people were barely even cognizant of what Islam was before 9/11.
And yes, as Brett (kind of) said, the events of that day went on to exert an incredibly strong influence the foreign policy of the only superpower on Earth, which- like it or not- in turn touches the lives of pretty much everyone.
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how often do you think the average person had devoted any amount of time to considering terrorism? It was barely a blip on the radar. Hell, most people were barely even cognizant of what Islam was before 9/11.
In Britain, major terrorist acts in Manchester and London were more than just a blip on the radar (I heard the Bishopsgate bomb while sitting in my garden), and nothing to do with Islam either.
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Bombings weren't new to the US either, Oklahoma City for one and I can remember Bin Laden being mentioned in connection with the WTC attack very quickly because of a previous attempt (vans in the parking garage I think?).
It was undoubtedly a very significant event, and it did alter global politics. I just don't see any of it as turning the world on its head. War on terror? First came from a speech by Reagan in the '80s if I remember right. War in Iraq? It never really stopped since Operation Desert Storm, and the British had been sending troops over there for what, close to a hundred years by that point? War in Afghanistan? Again, not a new arena for Western intervention but I think it was the first time the US had ground troops over there. They certainly weren't newcomers to intervention by other means though. Strict domestic security? Sure it got ramped up globally but it's not like domestic surveillance wasn't something any of the countries that did it hadn't been investing in heavily beforehand. Islam as a threat? Undoubtedly a massive increase in that perception in the US (the UK and other countries were already familiar with racism against Muslim minorities and discussion of Islam as a cultural threat by this point) but it was just that, an increase in a perception rather than an inversion of one. 9/11 just seemed to make increases in a bunch of stuff that had been going on for a really long time.
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I get the impression that what September 11th has mostly done for the American on the street is create a situation where the word "terrorism" can be used politically to achieve results. I'm not in any way saying that the death of all those people wasn't horrific, shocking and devastating for their families and friends, but the reaction does seem to be a little disproportionate, and I can only assume that it is because of the media response to the event and the political exploitation of that.
It's not entirely fair to compare Britain's experience of terrorism to that of the USA because we have very different histories. There have been repeated terrorist attacks over here; the IRA in particular were causing major panic and fear for a good while before 2001. So people in the UK were perhaps more used to the idea that people would want to attack us. In fact, the startpoint for most people's grasp of British history is the 1066 invasion.
America has not, to my knowledge and correct me if I'm wrong, ever been invaded and has a history of being a superpower. So the shock of a country that had spent nearly a hundred years being considered the dominant superpower, and several hundred years before that (I'm thinking since the War of Independence) being pretty damn strong, being attacked must have hit fairly hard. In comparison to that, the UK has had a bit of a seige mentality since the demise of the Empire and as an island has always been alert to the risk of attack.
So that's why I don't think "we didn't panic so much when we got attacked" is a very good argument. Having said that, however, I still don't feel that the American response to September 11th, on a national scale, is very logical to an outside viewer. Terrorism shouldn't be accepted as a good excuse for removing civil liberties or waging pointless wars. This goes just as much for the UK as for the USA.
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Terrorism was not new to the US.
(http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d158/dream_loud/diehard.jpg)
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It's interesting how much a young Alan Rickman looks like Zachary Quinto.
(mad ups for that, by the way)
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I have no idea what that picture was in reference to, but I know I was wrong about terrorism being new to the US. I suppose I meant it was the first time that America had perceived itself as under continuous threat.
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The Weather Underground were actually pretty consistent in their bombings during the early '70s and in the late 19th - early 20th century there was quite a lot of terrorism on the go, such as Alexander Berkman's attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick and Leon Czolgosz's successful assassination of President McKinley. Compared to much of America's history this is a very quiet period for domestic terrorism, though of course perception and reality are not the same thing.
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The factor you are missing is the mindset of the typical American. During those periods America was not the "super awesome untouchable superpower" that is has been considered since WWII. I really think that a large portion of the reaction to 9/11 was related to terrorists showing that foreigners could actually damage our country and kill our people. Kind of a bruised ego type of thing.
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The Weather Underground were operating some time after WW2, I doubt most of them were even born during it. You do have a point in that all of these were instances of domestic terrorism though. Well, sort of anyway since quite a lot involved immigrants and that's often seen as outside influence, and they were all left wing groups or individuals and 20th century examples of that were usually seen as the influence of the USSR. But 9/11 was so thoroughly foreign nobody could deny it came from outside, which does make it easier to get all self-righteous about.
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9/11 set about this idea that terrorist conspiracies were state-level threats. They never were, of course. As free-floating bodies they have very little power except in failed states like Afghanistan and Lebanon. As a person living in a rural area, my chances of being killed by terrorists are about as good as my being struck by lightning on a cloudless day. Urban residents have marginally greater risk. There's very very little that people actually have to fear.
But I get where Dovey's coming from. The principles of foreign and domestic policy in the US, the priorities of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the level of concern for civil liberties, all changed dramatically over the course of a few hours, and that's had and will continue to have important implications the world over. 9/11 inflamed and legitimized neoconservatism for 8 long years. It more or less led to the allowance of two overseas conflicts, neither of which would have happened had the attacks not taken place, the effects of which will be felt for generations. The kind of extremism that facilitated the attacks was an inevitably produced byproduct of globalization and the spread of western culture into conservative countries, but it took a catastrophe to call attention to that fact. Unfortunately there's really not a lot we can do.
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(http://lookatthisfuckingteabagger.tumblr.com/photo/1280/187766590/1/tumblr_kpvv3ng4b71qa3xbj)
teehee at both signs.
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I have no idea what that picture was in reference to, but I know I was wrong about terrorism being new to the US. I suppose I meant it was the first time that America had perceived itself as under continuous threat.
I'd also add that it was the first time that "terrorist" or "terorism" was being a mainstream used word.
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All of those teabagger signs make me want to rage so hard. So hard.
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I have no idea what that picture was in reference to
fucking DIE HARD geezus
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9/11 is that important to these people. It all makes sense to me now.
Actually 9/12 is that important, because they wanted their own separate day for it, because before they had to share it with that Bastion of liberalism (New York City) and the Seat of the All Hated Government (DC) and those pesky victims families.
"You know, it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families. ... I don't hate all of them. I hate about, probably about 10 of them. But when I see, you know, 9-11 victim family, on television, or whatever, I'm just like, "Oh, shut up." I'm so sick of them, because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them." - Glenn Beck (http://mediamatters.org/blog/200909110032)
9/11 really was that big, for me (who was born downstate, had family in the city and even in the PATH station under the towers that day.) It ranks up there with the Berlin Wall coming down as huge events go. Because a certain segment of the right (largely neoconservatives) has attempted to hijack its meaning and use it as justification for furthering their own agenda, a lot of people lose sight of that.
It's a big deal because American's have traditionally been isolationists, who have counted on the fact that the oceans surrounding us would make us untouchable on our own territory. It's also a big deal because Washington is a traditionally realist town, and all of a sudden, violent non-state actors pose the biggest threat to our national security, something that can't be explained by typical realist theory, which claims states are the primary unit of analysis.
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THINGS
STUFF
I love it when people who are way smarter than me explain what I am trying to say. This, guys. This!
"You know, it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families. ... I don't hate all of them. I hate about, probably about 10 of them. But when I see, you know, 9-11 victim family, on television, or whatever, I'm just like, "Oh, shut up." I'm so sick of them, because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them." - Glenn Beck
Hey compared to Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck is a picture of restraint on this one!
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In Britain, major terrorist acts in Manchester and London were more than just a blip on the radar (I heard the Bishopsgate bomb while sitting in my garden), and nothing to do with Islam either.
There was a huge qualitative shift in the common opinion on terrorism, though, and I think that, more than anything else, is what changed. Obviously my view is skewed somewhat given the wee conflict just north of my hometown, but I certainly got the feeling that the Provo's English campaigns were dealt with in the same stoic way as the Blitz - stiff upper lip, won't let them change us, that sort of thing. Comparatively, there was so much more fuss over the handful of terrorist attacks Britain has experienced since September 11, 2001. Now, maybe I'm wrong, and anyone who lived through the Troubles from an English perspective and can correct me on this, please do so. 9/11 (god I hate that phrase but it is the only convenient shorthand) turned terrorism from a low-level background threat to the huge world-shaking, terrifying all-the-time thing.
Why did this qualitative shift occur? I think at least part of it is due to the 'spectacle' of the event. I don't think anyone has ever watched such a dramatic and spectacular event live on television before, or had the opportunity. Hell, I can't think of any events that fit the bill that have even been recorded. Add to that the wide audiences, and you have something that has got a particular resonance no other occurence has had on such a wide and instantaneous scale.
(There's some interesting stuff to be drawn out on the postmodernist nature of terrorism, I think.)
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Hey compared to Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck is a picture of restraint on this one!
Compared to Ann Coulter, a mountain lion with rabies is a picture of restraint.
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9/11 on a personal level will probably always maintain itself as an incredibly resonating moment of time. Like Odi said, the fact that it was live on television just made it that much more vivid. Sitting in a packed school cafeteria where you could only hear the tv and a few sobs knowing I was literally watching thousands of people that lived less than two hours away from me die is not something that is soon forgotten. The global importance will most likely be remembered for its shifting of US foreign policy and an even greater focus on Islam and terrorism in the media. However, in the States, it represented far more than that. We did exist within a shell up until that point. Not since Pearl Harbor had a foreign group managed to cause such chaos on US soil. Until then, terrorism was something that really only happened abroad. Was it a myopic view? Absolutely. Yet it is hard to appreciate the danger of an event until it happens. Suddenly having a focus on just domestic affairs was no longer enough. A group of extremists discontent with American culture living on the opposite side of the world directly affected me. Even more frightening is that if it were not for some heroic passengers on one of the flights, there was a good chance that many members of the US Congress would be dead. The fact remains that we are still as a country learning how to react from the event. The initial surge of patriotism and desire to stand up again were quickly confused by questionable foreign policy decisions that turned such a tragic event into a marketing ploy to attack Iraq. Few things upset me more than this. Even the joking nature of this thread speaks to the innumerable damage that horrid decision for war has caused. We mock the patriotism not because of the event itself, but because of what it has been warped into a tool of, and there is a real tragedy in that. This is at least my take on the matter.
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I give up
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(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Flight93Crash.jpg)
(http://stj911.org/evidence/docs/P200059_1.jpg)
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/47john_lear/04images/911/Flight93CraterReuters.jpg)
(http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c266/Terral03/93crash2.jpg)
The crash site of Flight 93, in PA. Pictures taken on 9/11.
Space for commentary intentionally left blank.
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Wait, so did the lizardmen do it on behalf of the international cabal of Jewish financiers or was it the other way around?
You've lost me a little here.
It all came down to the fact that the Jewish financiers had recieved too many vaccinations, and had been drinking fluoridated water.
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Why did this qualitative shift occur? I think at least part of it is due to the 'spectacle' of the event. I don't think anyone has ever watched such a dramatic and spectacular event live on television before, or had the opportunity. Hell, I can't think of any events that fit the bill that have even been recorded. Add to that the wide audiences, and you have something that has got a particular resonance no other occurence has had on such a wide and instantaneous scale.
(There's some interesting stuff to be drawn out on the postmodernist nature of terrorism, I think.)
And, intriguingly enough, one can say that Al Quaida essentially got exactly what they wanted. Raise your hand if you knew jack shit about Al Quaida before the incident. It got them international infamy, put their message out there and essentially put America on the road down a pretty dangerous path that we're still trying to recover from.
Does anyone really think Bush would've stayed in office for eight years if 9/11 never happened? Does anyone really think that the absolutely batshit policies that Cheney got pushed through would've gone through without 9/11 as a justification?
For all their crowing and half-hearted mourning, the World Trade Center incident was probably the best thing to happen to the Republicans since Reagan left office.
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The crash site of Flight 93, in PA. Pictures taken on 9/11.
Space for commentary intentionally left blank.
I wish you didn't, it's making me hard to tell just how mean I should be to you right now.
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wait if you reordered those pics you totally could've made it into a zoom meme
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Why did this qualitative shift occur? I think at least part of it is due to the 'spectacle' of the event. I don't think anyone has ever watched such a dramatic and spectacular event live on television before, or had the opportunity. Hell, I can't think of any events that fit the bill that have even been recorded. Add to that the wide audiences, and you have something that has got a particular resonance no other occurence has had on such a wide and instantaneous scale.
(There's some interesting stuff to be drawn out on the postmodernist nature of terrorism, I think.)
I watched the fall of the Berlin wall live on TV and my world has never been the same since. This may, of course, be a geographical thing since I'm here in Europe and I suspect you are not.
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He's in Ireland, dogg.
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Live and learn. Well ... then I don't quite see how the fall of the wall might have been lost on you as a dramatic and spectacular occurance. But, hey ... my spectacle might be your walk in the park.
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The Weather Underground were actually pretty consistent in their bombings during the early '70s and in the late 18th - early 19th century there was quite a lot of terrorism on the go, such as Alexander Berkman's attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick and Leon Czolgosz's successful assassination of President McKinley. Compared to much of America's history this is a very quiet period for domestic terrorism, though of course perception and reality are not the same thing.
HAHAHAHA
My history teacher itold me Leon Czolgosz was the guy who shot Archduke Ferdinand, which started World War One. Holy shit. Holy SHIT, the american educational system blows.
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Just one failure among a metric fuckton others.
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about 10 successes.
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Live and learn. Well ... then I don't quite see how the fall of the wall might have been lost on you as a dramatic and spectacular occurance. But, hey ... my spectacle might be your walk in the park.
I was three, I wasn't there in any real sense. I mean, who knows, maybe I did see it fall on telly? But it didn't register in the same way, unsurprisingly. Also, I'd say the image of a plane flying into a building is a little more dramatic of an image than the wall falling, but once again, that might be my personal experience speaking. As to which one was more important? Ask again in two hundred years, probably. It's still too soon to tell.
EDIT: Just realised I didn't make it clear that when I saw "dramatic" or "spectacular" here, I'm just talking about the image, not the act.
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Drama may also be quite localised. When the Hungerford gunman was shooting at people at random, I was working in an office only a few miles away with a load of people whose families were within range of that guy's gun. That was drama (even without images).
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He's in Ireland, trick.
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i'm trying to think of top 40 rock songs that have reference 9/11 but i can't. someone help
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They banned those.
Actually, not so long ago, I came across a list of songs that got banned becase they were making references to 9/11 and Middle East. Weirdly, "Walk Like An Egyptian" made that list.
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i'm trying to think of top 40 rock songs that have reference 9/11 but i can't. someone help
I don't remember the lyrics off by heart and it probably wasn't Top 40 but there's always "I Raq and I Roll" by Clint Black.
Yes, it's as awful as the name suggests.
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There are a ton of country songs that do.
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/worley-darryl/have-you-forgotten-3876.html
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/keith-toby/courtesy-of-the-red-white-and-blue-10125.html
http://cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/jackson-alan/where-were-you-when-the-world-stopped-turning-1787.html
The Toby Keith song really is a classic.
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i'm trying to think of top 40 rock songs that have reference 9/11 but i can't. someone help
Didn't the Springsteen album The Rising have some hits?
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from wiki
Linkin Park - "Crawling" (WTC Tribute Edit)
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Goldfinger, Mest, and Good Charlotte - The Innocent (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYIS-oIgsDk)
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Goldfinger, Mest, and Good Charlotte - The Innocent (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYIS-oIgsDk)
Linkin Park - "Crawling" (WTC Tribute Edit)
that's really insensitive of those guys, to be putting out music at a time when people were already so scared and angry
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When the wall came down I saw it on the television and it changed my world too. I think it's because I'm just old enough to have experienced some of the Cold War. Granted, I was only eight, but you understand the broader themes at work by that age. If I'd been a little older, it may very well have had the visceral impact that the towers coming down did. But I do agree. I think the imagery, as well as proximity, may well have something to do with it, I still vividly remember the Challenger Explosion as well as Reagan's speech afterwards, despite the fact that I was only four.
If many of you ask your parents, they'll still remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, and many can remember it like it was yesterday.
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i'm trying to think of top 40 rock songs that have reference 9/11 but i can't. someone help
Didn't the Springsteen album The Rising have some hits?
I'm pretty sure the album was cut prior to 9/11 and all the songs that people take as being about 9/11 are actually about New Jersey which was and remains a terrible shithole that Springsteen looks upon with sadness.
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The crash site of Flight 93, in PA. Pictures taken on 9/11.
Space for commentary intentionally left blank.
I wish you didn't, it's making me hard to tell just how mean I should be to you right now.
I don't get it, what are you trying to say?
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Basically what I'm wondering is whether or not you're a Truther
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If many of you ask your parents, they'll still remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, and many can remember it like it was yesterday.
Actually this is a great example of the psychological phenomenon through which people make up memories. A lot of people's memories about when and where they heard about Kennedy are fabrications. They aren't deliberately lying, but rather they sincerely believe something that isn't actually the case, like they think they knew about the assassination the moment it happened but really they were in the yard at the time and saw news footage a few hours later.
This is a tangent unrelated to the main point really; whether or not the memories are true, the event clearly had a big effect on people. It's just a topic that fascinates me, reflecting on when and why people believe stories that are made up, with these stories including things they've told themselves and "people" certainly including me (ie. I know for certain there are many things I remember that never actually happened.)
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Basically what I'm wondering is whether or not you're a Truther
What commentary could I have made that would reveal me as such? What significance is there to those photographs that suggest to you that by posting them, being a "truther" is a possible implication?
I mean, I've caught on to what you're saying, I'm just going to let you say it.
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I'm going to go with the fact that one of the photos is linked from Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice (http://stj911.org/) and some folks that have been around the internet have seen other people do the exact same thing before.
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And the Lockerbie bombing, which we're about it?
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I'm going to go with the fact that one of the photos is linked from Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice (http://stj911.org/) and some folks that have been around the internet have seen other people do the exact same thing before.
Oh, clearly. I mean, all I did was GIS "flight 93." I didn't even look at where the images were coming from. Obviously this is not a new thing, considering how easy it was to find this stuff and where on the internet the search engine ended up finding what I was looking for.
I should've arranged them to zoom in, though, it's true.
I only posted the pictures because they represent the weirdest and least conventionally explainable incongruity in the whole affair. I have some idle conjectures about their significance but I'm hardly rabid about it (at least, not to the point where the term "Truther" deserves a capital T when referring to me.)
By the way, the first page of GIS results for "Pan Am 103." (http://images.google.com/images?q=pan%20am%20103&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi) Call me crazy, but there seems to be a distinct difference.
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these things generally become less incongrous when you start listening to qualified engineers, scientists, air crash investigators and so on rather than people who believe that the jewish bolshevik banker conspiracy did it
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Yeah you gotta make sure not to forget that the international bankers who organized the 9/11 attacks were backed by (or perhaps are physical incarnations of, depending on who you talk to) hyperdimensional reptilians bent on enslaving all intelligent life.
No, seriously, there's no plane in those pictures. Flight 93 clearly did not crash into a field in Pennsylvania. There would be a bunch of plane wreckage in a field if a plane had crashed into a field. You don't need to nitpick about the temperature that jet fuel burns at (nor do you need to theorize about rich Jewish lizards) in order to see this.
(Just for the sake of it, I'll present the conjecture that perhaps 9/11 happened exactly the way we have been told it did, with the sole exception that flight 93 was actually shot down using something that contained enough high explosives to scatter the wreckage far beyond the field the plane allegedly crashed into, and that it was decided that revealing this tactical decision wouldn't be as good for the public as suggesting that the passengers on the plane intentionally downed it. Again, no need for vast Zionist agendas. Just saying, if a plane had crashed in a field in PA, there'd be pictures of a plane crashed in a field in PA, and there are no such pictures. There are instead pictures of a hole in the ground with no plane in it.)
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Yarr! (http://www.americablog.com/2009/09/its-not-racism-its-being-american-gop.html)
(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_1xQeOPE9ePU/SrJ5WVy3DjI/AAAAAAAAD4A/EkyqKJdpa9Q/s400/racism-obama.jpg)
yarr!
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Yar?
(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1xQeOPE9ePU/SrJ5W8HaedI/AAAAAAAAD4I/73l3-GS4ew4/s400/original.jpg)
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Oh oh oh can we have a 9/11 Truther thread, please please please please!
I don't think we've had one yet on this forum and I miss them.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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Just for the sake of it, I'll present the conjecture that perhaps 9/11 happened exactly the way we have been told it did, with the sole exception that flight 93 was actually shot down using something that contained enough high explosives to scatter the wreckage far beyond the field the plane allegedly crashed into, and that it was decided that revealing this tactical decision wouldn't be as good for the public as suggesting that the passengers on the plane intentionally downed it.
this is the goofiest conspiracy i've ever heard of especially when the actual events of the flight are well documented and don't even get me started on other 9/11 truth baloney
the camera is not an objective eye and so asking people "uhhh WHERE'S THE WRECKAGE!?? :roll:" shows an extraordinary willingness to lay down with your hands over your ears trying to block out reason while the truth soars close enough overhead for you to touch it
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Oh Johnny.
<3
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:evil:
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hang on speaking of zoom meme
I'm going to go with the fact that one of the photos is linked from Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice (http://stj911.org/) and some folks that have been around the internet have seen other people do the exact same thing before.
Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice (http://stj911.org/)
Scholars
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So if I get your meaning, we should trust them due to the fact that they are scholars?
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Precisely. And here I was thinking this was all a crock of shit! Boy is my face red.
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MEMBER LIST
name degrees affiliation title
Michael Allen BA, BS, MA, Current doctoral student University of Rhode Island, University of New Hampshire Master Mariner
holy shit I will get that many degrees if that is what it takes to be MASTER MARINER.
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Hell, most people were barely even cognizant of what Islam was before 9/11.
This is a bit late of an answer, but to be fair, people don't really have any clue today either.
Also, this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUPMjC9mq5Y&feature=player_embedded) at 6:20-ish has a lot of people talking about the Czars. Are there actually that many people that can't differ between a Tsar and a government official? Has this been a real outrage? What?
Can somebody please take away the US nukes soon because I'm getting real, real scared of this bunch being voters in a state who has them. Jesus.
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I wasn't cogent of Islam at the time, but I certainly didn't know what christanity was really.
Also, yeah 9/11 was a big event, but even if it was perpatrated by people other than those who it was blamed on (not saying it was, I personally think that the truth movement is a rather large piece of hooey) its more important to focus on the events that occured afterwards and the responses of governments than what possible reason a lot of people had to pile a plane into a building.
I can understand conspiracy theorists and there reasoning that the whole world is being secretly run, but if you actually look at the world, really and think about you realise quite how unttenable that idea is. Even the reptillian lizard folk would presumably like all humans annihilated and would have done so earlier than now. It seems as if conspiracy is an attempt to just shift the blame from yourself on to everyone else. "its the man keeping me down", "its the governments fault" "they turk arrr jarbs!". Heres a hint okay, a small one but it may prove vital. Try and change something yourself, and if that doesn't work keep on trying, because even if the world is controlled from behind the scenes do you actually think that anyone of those facless corporations are going to care about what you do?
sorry, I am just getting a bit sick of conspiracy and ignorance of razors in general.
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MEMBER LIST
name degrees affiliation title
Michael Allen BA, BS, MA, Current doctoral student University of Rhode Island, University of New Hampshire Master Mariner
holy shit I will get that many degrees if that is what it takes to be MASTER MARINER.
It's not that impressive, I mean he's not even a Grand Master and after the next expansion he'll be so far behind.
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the camera is not an objective eye and so asking people "uhhh WHERE'S THE WRECKAGE!?? :roll:" shows an extraordinary willingness to lay down with your hands over your ears trying to block out reason while the truth soars close enough overhead for you to touch it
I ... dude, there isn't a plane there. I know the weird shit I came up with was goofy, but it's not as goofy as looking at a picture of a hole in a field and thinking it's a picture of the site of a plane crash. Do a GIS for "plane crash" and I guarantee you the only picture you come up with that shows a hole in the ground rather than a mass of twisted metal will be a picture taken in Shanksville, PA on 9/11/01 or shortly thereafter. There isn't a single visible object at the Flight 93 site bigger than a seat cushion. You could probably fit all the debris in Shanksville into a the bed of a single large pickup truck. It's literally just a hole in the ground. Jet engine blocks and fuselage beams don't just vaporize on impact with dirt, and if they do, they at least leave bigger holes in the ground.
I'm not claiming to know what happened, but it seems pretty clear to me that there's something that didn't happen, and it's a plane vaporizing on impact. Yet that is the only possible thing that could've happened in a story that starts with a plane crashing in a field, and leads to pictures being taken of that field that show the amount of wreckage seen in Shanksville, PA. Since the pictures were taken, it's clear that the plane did not crash into the field. There would be a plane's worth of debris in the field if the plane had crashed into the field. Is this really that difficult? Is there an alternate explanation for the total lack of plane in that field? Are you really saying that it's not worth asking where the wreckage is ... when there actually isn't any wreckage where there should be? This seems so straightforward to me. Plane crash = crashed plane. No crashed plane = no plane crash.
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man i didn't think that the whole no plane in the field was that big of a point for truthers.
so like the thing is the gov't blew a whole in the ground and a plane is missing?
i mean im not very fond of gov't or states or hierarchy but man i even get hesitant around truther talk.
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OK, so I did some quick checking on Wikipedia, just looking at numbers.
Dimensions of a Boeing 757-200:
Length: 47.3m, or 155' 3''
Wingspan: 38m, or 124' 10''
From Flight 93 Wiki page: "The impact left a crater eight to ten feet deep, and thirty to fifty feet wide.[54]" [54] is a link to an article from a Seattle newspaper that quoted "All that remained after the Boeing 757 crashed into an open field were a crater about eight to 10 feet deep, and 30 to 50 feet wide, pieces of debris no larger than a phone book, said Capt. Frank Monaco of the Pennsylvania State Police."
Even if the plane hit the ground perfectly perpendicular to it, the wingspan of the plane dictates that either the crater left behind would be wider than 30-50 feet, OR a lot more wing debris would've ended up scattered around on either side of it. Look at the crash site from the air again (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flight93Crash.jpg), imagine how big a 155' X 124' airplane would be (use the cars and people in the lower right of the photo for reference), and then think about what it would look like if 100 tons of aircraft had hit that dirt "at 563 miles per hour (906 km/h) at a 40 degree nose-down, inverted attitude." The ground isn't even disturbed over a large enough area to fit any cross-section of a plane, at any angle.
Is that even weird to anyone else? Do I just look like a dick right now? Someone, tell me it's not totally crazy to look at this information and doubt.
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I imagine it's the same reason why the hole in the Pentagon wasn't a cartoony cutout of a plane either. (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html?page=6#bigplane)
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Is that even weird to anyone else? Do I just look like a dick right now? Someone, tell me it's not totally crazy to look at this information and doubt.
when it becomes not totally crazy to look at this information and doubt, i will let you know. i assume it will be around the same time they start making plane wings out of lead instead of aluminium foil and petrol. oh and also they travel back in time and install them on the plane. in summary, wings are not magic.
But seriously? A much better thing to look at would be the bits of the plane that are actually any way solid - fuselage, engines, that sort of thing. The fuselage is apparently about 12 feet across, and the wheelbase (which is a similar distance to the distance between engines) is about sixty feet. That fits in ok with the figures for the crater.
Also, an aircraft that probably weighed about 100 tonnes, loaded with 30,000l of jet fuel, hits the ground at 906 km/h? That has a potential energy of 1.1 x 1012 joules - that's 300 tonnes of TNT. Of course, the whole efficiency thing comes into play, as that would imply no loss to any of the other possible factors, but we're still talking 3 tonnes of TNT or more. That's a hell of a lot of energy to apply to a plane. It's also FAR more energy than any deployed missile in existence - the biggest air-to-air missiles have 60kg of explosives.
Doesn't add up.
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::sigh:: I don't want to seem contentious about this, it'll clearly make me look like a crazy person. A while ago, I looked at photographs of the Flight 93 crash site and my immediate thought was "there's no way that's what it really looked like when that plane crashed there." There was just too little stuff. I still look at those pictures and think "there's no way that's what it looked like" but now it's "IF that plane crashed there." And, I mean, there are a bunch of eyewitnesses to the descent of a plane, and that's hard to argue with, but ... honestly? I've never seen it happen in person, but I imagine that the stuff that planes are made of does not simply vaporize. Metal doesn't just transmute into flame and smoke. Maybe it does shred into pieces smaller than a phone book, but even then, I think I'd expect there to still be more stuff on the ground, or maybe a bigger hole. Maybe there was a hollow in the ground that the plane debris just collapsed into and was swallowed up by (it did crash into a reclaimed strip mine after all), but even then, a bigger hole seems appropriate.
I mean, I admit that this is a really silly-looking picture, and totally a shitty shop job, but ... well ...
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/47john_lear/04images/911/plane.into.crater.0.jpg)
It doesn't seem like everything from the fuselage out should just disappear. Maybe that's what happened? I don't know, I've never seen a plane crash happen in real life. But it seems like too much metal to just vanish.
This isn't a question of "who I'm listening to" or anything like that. I don't have any grand story of the massive government cover-up. I just look at a picture and see a hole in the ground that looks WAY too small and WAY too devoid of bits of plane. Is that weird? I understand I'm not an expert, but this looks like a common-sense judgment to me. I can't imagine a 100-ton plane making a hole and pile of stuff that small.
I tried to find stories of plane impacts similar to this one, to see just how possible it was for a plane to effectively mostly disappear on impact, and I came up with the story of USAir Flight 427, which went down near Pittsburgh in 1994 at a near-perpendicular angle to the ground, going almost as fast as Flight 93. It was a smaller plane (a 737 rather than a 757) and the pictures show not a whole lot of wreckage, although it's still recognizable as pieces of plane (http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/images/flight93/427-585/us-air427.gif) (and there were many pieces that had to be excavated, apparently up to 8 feet deep, rather than simply picked up). So it's starting to look a bit more believable to me that a larger plane, crashing into a softer plot of dirt, at a higher speed, could result in even less visible wreckage. Even still, I don't think it's ridiculous to look at pictures of the impact site and ask questions.
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Oh god no, I didn't mean for a second to imply that doubting before an expert explanation is silly. In fact, it can often be quite a good thing, because it will drive you to expand your knowledge and find out what happened.
Eight years later? On the internets? That's a different story. If you have any doubts that you haven't looked into and been dissuaded of, then yeah, that's crazy talk.
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So I started with a few pictures and a lot of incredulity, got a bunch more information, and I'm changing my tone because it looks (amazingly) possible that a plane can just half-disintegrate, half-bury itself upon impact with a field of dirt, and leave a really ridiculously small footprint with very little visible wreckage. I did not think that was even feasible before looking at the case of USAir 427, so I'm glad I did some research (although I still resent some of the contempt that was directed at me for even opening my mouth about it, and I don't blame anyone who looks at what I looked at and sees what I saw). Going into a frenzy of research on 9/11 isn't exactly something I do all that often, so the fact that it took 8 years for me to reach this point (after taking 4 to get to the point of "hold on, that doesn't make sense") doesn't bother me.
I'm not gonna lie ... there's a lot of stuff that still seems really suspicious to me (the collapse of WTC 7, most notably) and if the event gets lined up in a historical context next to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Pearl Harbor raid, and the sinking of the Lusitania, which have all since been alleged to have been subject to premeditation to varying degrees and in various ways to create public-support basis for entering a war, the idea that the whole thing was totally surprising and not part of the basis of any plans makes little sense to me. Basically what I'm saying is that the whole thing strikes me as something that makes it very appropriate to get very angry at my own government (you know, because I needed more reasons for that).
At the very least, I think that a lot of warning signs were deliberately ignored and that there was some degree of tacit encouragement to the hijackers and their associates, and that the war in Afghanistan was deliberately scheduled to start shortly after the attacks that some people knew were coming. I think it is possibly though not necessarily true that secondary explosives were used to precipitate the collapse of WTC 1, 2, and 7 ... I don't think this absolutely WAS what happened, but I don't think it's totally impossible either, and there are definitely a few red flags that I'm not yet willing to discount. I think it's ridiculous of anyone to attack me for this position, because claiming that it is totally impossible that there were any explosives in those buildings is something that really can't be backed up with evidence at all (although I think it's also the case that anyone claiming that it is totally true that there were explosives has not yet met the burden of proof).
The notion that specific entities within the US government deliberately killed several thousand US citizens (or, in a more mild version of the story, allowed them to be killed) is NOT really that far-fetched to me, nor is the idea that this could happen without repercussions if desired. The jump from this to "that is exactly what happened" is not really that big. I don't think it's beyond the moralities of our leaders (or for that matter their subordinates), I don't think it's beyond the capabilities of our "black-ops" networks (which I do believe exist), and it just doesn't strike me as totally unbelievable that this is what happened in the abstract sense. The exact details are still fuzzy enough that the big picture could still be anything, and the only possibility that I'm confident totally discounting is the "official story" ... I'm just not sure how far the truth deviates from it, exactly. Things don't add up, but I'm not sure what exactly they do add up to.
Even if the events of that particular day were exactly what we've been told they were, I still believe that, at the very least, the reaction our government had to the attacks was carefully premeditated, because at the very least, some people in our government knew that the attacks were going to happen. That's 80% of the story to me anyway ... it's all I need to be fucking enraged about the events of last 8 years. I'm not a die-hard "truther" because I don't have a clear idea, for myself, of what I think happened. But I do feel comfortable blaming my own government for what happened, on at least some levels, and I think it's still the grossest injustice of this century and will stay that way for a while.
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your sig is remarkably ironic next to your post
the thing about conspiracy theories is this: ask yourself how many people would need to be in on a plan for it to work. the higher this number is, the less likely your conspiracy theory is to be true
the only point of yours that i see as being in any way a possible explanation is the claim that information might have been deliberately not acted upon. even then, i reckon it unlikely. the black ops people that the US have are still people, american people, and even in the CIA there are going to be people who have qualms about letting thousands of innocent americans die
also remember that militaries have contingency plans for nearly everything, and are also very good at rapidly generating extremely detailed plans
i feel confident ruling out the other claims truthers make, mind, because their evidence consists of picking out a few aberrations/accidents/chance happenstance and concocting it into a huge theory, and also because of the rule of conspiracy theories
also, yes, some people in the US government did know the attacks were about to happen. this, however, needs qualification. they knew that there was a high risk of some spectacular attacks being carried out in some fashion at some point around that time. that's not actionable. it's not the same as a deliberate ignoring of the bad guys
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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
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See, Ozy, I believe that, but it's not malice that I attribute this to. Nobody in the government secretly hates working-class New Yorkers. It's the drive for power and profit that I think can bring people to do stuff like this. I'm certain there were people who were planning for war long before 9/11 and used foreknowledge of 9/11, however vague, in these plans. I mean, if you're already planning on starting a war for profit, some collateral damage of a few thousand civilians seems like a reasonable means to the end. And it's not ultimately "malicious," per se ... just good business. All some people need is enough dollars and power on the other end of their agenda, and they'll follow it, insulated from the cost in humanity by their privilege.
At least, that's what I believe about the way the world works. That's really what I'm going on, honestly. It worked out too well for the people who turned into villains over the following 8 years, the villainy had to have begun before the hijackings.
I'm sure there were plenty of concerned American civil servants in the CIA, who knew some things but were limited in their actions to reporting them to their superiors. The higher the rank or power, the fewer people need to make conscious decisions in pursuit of a "conspiracy." If a conspiracy goes high enough, most people performing a function within it are just following orders and have no idea what the big picture looks like. Just as it's true that the bigger a hypothetical conspiracy is, the less likely it is to be real, it's also true that the higher up a conspiracy goes, the fewer people it needs actively working in it in order to function, because each individual wields a greater influence and can perform more functions.
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First the defence of Israel, now this.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on anything, but look at Iraq. If the Bush administration had wanted to go to war, they could have made up some shitty excuse and gone to war. There's no economic gain anywhere here. The income from the oil they can tap from middle east soil is as far as I know puny compared to the cost of the war.
Secondary, the black ops isn't that big. Yeah, there's secret police. Sure, they can cover a lot of ground. But back in 2001, Afghanistan wasn't interesting at all. The commies had left, the guys who could threaten Israel hangs around in Palestine and surrounding countries. When the bureaucracy is told that there's some extremists down there who is planning to blow up some American shit, why should they respond? There's people all over the world who wants to blow up some American shit. North-Korea had started making fucking nukes, southern America was getting closer to socialism all the time. Spending resources chasing after bogeymen in Taliban would have been plain stupidity when there's so many real threats everywhere.
The terrorists were lucky, and had a good plan. That's all it takes, really. They had a very slim chance, but they rolled a natural 20 a couple of times, and the towers went down. The reason for conspiracy theories and truthism is that a lot of people see the special forces of America as such an omnipotent organisation that it had to be an inside job. The arguments are built on lies, misunderstanding of science (The plane engines weren't hot enough to make WTC's metal structure melt/there should have been plane wreckage/the tower falls in a way that has to be controlled etc.), and avoiding parts of the truth.
The Afghanistan war didn't look like it was started for profit. It looked like an act of extreme desperation and the collective rage of a country.
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I'm reasonably sure this should've been moved to the Discuss forum about a page and a half back.
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I'm not claiming to be an expert on anything, but look at Iraq. If the Bush administration had wanted to go to war, they could have made up some shitty excuse and gone to war. There's no economic gain anywhere here. The income from the oil they can tap from middle east soil is as far as I know puny compared to the cost of the war.
You're missing something. The "cost of the war" is money paid by the government to contractors who are building weapons, constructing infrastructure, paying mercenaries, etc. ... the US government is not actually the financial beneficiary here. The people who profited from the wars (both Iraq and Afghanistan) are the people who got paid to make it all actually happen, not the people paying for it all to happen (aka the taxpayers of the USA).
The reason for conspiracy theories and truthism is that a lot of people see the special forces of America as such an omnipotent organisation that it had to be an inside job.
No, the reason for conspiracy theories is the intuition that many people have, including myself, and that may in fact be false, that the elite class in America (in other words, the men who are capable of wielding large amounts of both political and economic power ... Dick Cheney, for example) has an agenda that is geared to keep them in the positions of power that they're in, without regard for the degree of human suffering caused in the process, and that the series of events that started with 9/11 and has followed with two wars and countless infringements on civil rights and liberties around the world has been in service of that agenda to varying degrees.
The US is addicted to militarism, because its leaders are addicted to the support of those who profit through militarism. The wars are not for the profit of the US Treasury, they are for the profit of the private interests that were given massive contracts to service the war and reconstruction efforts ... and the human heads of those private interests have been represented in the US government to a laughably disproportionate degree. That's the real smoking gun, as far as I can see.
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it is possible to believe that elites are self-interested and like wars without being fucking mad
i mean, most people do it
don't attempt to try and make out that having a sensible outlook on what our leaders are like has ANYTHING to do with truther crap
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the higher up a conspiracy goes, the fewer people it needs actively working in it in order to function, because each individual wields a greater influence and can perform more functions.
Like they'd be the people to shoot down a civil airliner or plant explosives in the WTC themselves?
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It seems pretty clear that everyone else in this thread is tired of it, so feel free to just let it die.
What it comes down to for me is that I'm perfectly willing to believe that there are entities in the world (individuals or organizations) that COULD do this and get away with it, that these entities furthermore WOULD do this, and that they never lived in caves in the Middle East but rather are very very rich and powerful and influential. This isn't because I think it's impossible for cave-dwelling jihadists to bring an event like this about, but rather because this particular event fit too well into a larger picture and timeline for it to have been that uncoordinated. Maybe the hijackers were trained and directed by undercover US agents (that wouldn't take too many people at all). Maybe some way weirder shit went down (like evacuation drills in the weeks leading up to the attack being used to plant explosives in the WTC buildings). The only thing I feel confident of is that the incident was deliberate on the part of more interests than just some religious fanatics who wanted to kill Americans.
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(http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/7/2009/09/500x_poll.jpg)
Our crazies are less crazy than your crazies!
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I dunno if I actually find that graph to put the Dems in a better light. I guess it depends on how people are interpreting the phrase "Bush allowed 9-11 to happen." I can buy into saying yes if you mean that as president it he bears some responsibility for the fact that the government failed to prevent 9-11. You know, kind of like how a keeper might "allow" a goal. But to say that he was OK with it happening is basically making the claim that the dude is balls out evil. That hits me as a more serious claim than saying that Obama might have fudged the truth a bit on the details of his birth. I mean, hell, that isn't even necessarily all that sinister. I'm not really worried about a dude who lived the vast majority of his life here wanting to become president.
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I like that while adding some softening context to the Trutherism, you completely remove all context from Birtherism.
Both claims are fucking ridiculous, but the scale of artifice that Trutherism requires is extra fuckin' ridiculous. Sure, there could be some super-duper sophisticated deception involved in presenting our President as a natural American, but for every supposed deception claimed in Trutherism there are ever more deceptions that have to be claimed for it to be consistent, which makes it a conspiracy theory through and through. It's similar to Holocaust Denial - in order for the Holocaust to have been a lie, the number of interconnected collaborations, lies and deceptions had to have been staggering, and what's more every single fucking one of them had to have gone absolutely perfectly for over 60 years. Surely these so called "survivors" have been duped or are lying for their own reasons! Surely the people who saw these plane crashes are being duped or are lying for their own reasons! Wackety schmakety do!
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I'm pretty comfortable with doing things like that when someone starts going "Ahaha, your side is crazier than our side." Even if it's meant tongue in cheek people go along with that line of thought way too often for my tastes.
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It's similar to Holocaust Denial - in order for the Holocaust to have been a lie, the number of interconnected collaborations, lies and deceptions had to have been staggering, and what's more every single fucking one of them had to have gone absolutely perfectly for over 60 years.
This is exactly where I cannot believe in so many conspiracy theories, especially ones like Trutherism. It requires such enormous faith in the idea that everything went perfectly right rather than the simple acceptance that something went wrong. I can accept that our government failed to thwart a terrorist attack. I cannot accept that our government has their shit together enough to orchestrate pulling the wool over our eyes so fucking thoroughly that a bunch of dudes on YouTube were the only ones to spot it.
Let's face it. We know the government lied about WMDs in Iraq or, at the very least, willfully misinterpreted intel. We know that for an absolute fact. They managed to pull off the deadly attack on American soil in history and blame it on someone else, but couldn't manage to, I don't know- put some damn WMDs in Iraq to keep the American public on their side?
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counterpoint/devil's advocate:
Nobody is really claiming the US government did this
rather that some shadowy agency has enough influence over the US government to do this without government interference
very few people are stupid enough to argue the Bush Administration was actually competent enough to pull it off
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Because that implies that any "shadow" organisation, is able to pull this crap off.
Throughout history there have been people who think that their lives are being controlled, by God, destiny etc. But now that people are starting to think that there lives are run like that but their lives suck they can ill afford to look at themselves and think "oh god I f*cked up" no. Its just much much easier to blame someone on why yopu haven't done anything. Once you start doing that you get into a strange cycle where, as humans think they are at the centre of the universe, the same thing that has stopped you from becoming the doctor/ screwing the cheerleader/ killing that man in Reno becomes the same "shadowy group" that ruins the world.
Here is a hint, the depth of human stupidity is bottomless, people can get away with things for a very long time, if they keep it to themselves or perhaps 5 other people, but the average people who are used to wielding the sort of power to make huge world shattering desicions are not the sort who "play well" with others.
The good money is on the fact that the world is not being orchastrated by some shadowy organisation from behind the scenes, Sometimes I wish it was, because the world would make a lot more sense. But it doesn't, there is no world spanning ancient conspiracy there is just humans, and there are lots of us.
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The good money is on the fact that the world is not being orchastrated by some shadowy organisation from behind the scenes
I would argue that the world is too complex a system to be able to predict it well enough to place bets reliably enough to hit "the good money" but if there was a sure fire bet based on patterns of behaviour, it would be that we are getting fucked by someone with power who wants to maintain it.
Occam's razor doesn't really apply to government conspiracy because the argument is that people are already programmed to fuck ourselves and have been since long before like a kind of self-harvesting crop.
This is why the best conspiracy theories all involve weird David Icke style DMT planes of existence where every human flaw is physicalized in whatever wacked out form they saw on their last bad trip.
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This may be beating a dead horse, but the lack of large pieces of wreckage is actually a very good indication that the aircraft did crash, rather than being blown up. When a passenger aircraft is hit with explosives, what does the major damage is not the explosive itself, but the rapid equalising of pressure. The pressure difference between the inside of an aircraft and the outside, at cruising height, puts about 8 psi on the outer skin of the aircraft. It's like a filled balloon. Make a large enough hole in the side, and the air inside will tear apart whichever rivetline you have cut through. The aircraft literally pops. Take Pan Am 103, the Lockerbie plane, as an example; when the bomb went off, that plane was literally torn in two, and then the pieces tumbled relatively slowly to earth. The terminal velocity of a piece of aircraft debris is much lower than the speed of an aircraft hitting the ground nose first under full power. At Lockerbie they found enormous pieces of the aeroplane, like the entire tail and nose section, as well as things like corpses and pieces of luggage that had survived the fall relatively intact. You've got to remember that aircraft aren't actually very strong in some ways. They're very lightly constructed. The skin of an aircraft is only about 3 millimetres thick aluminium, under enormous tension. A fully loaded 757 only ways, after all, about 110 tonnes, and a lot of that is fuel. When you finally take into account the fact that the melting point of aluminium is only 660.37 °C, well...
Now lets do some science. The great thing about science is you can do it yourself. I personally do it kinda badly, but here we go:
Now, using a NASA program for calculating terminal velocity*, plugging in earth conditions, for a piece of wreckage about two metres square and massing about 500 newtons (which I think is probably a fair approximation of a piece of the skin of a wrecked aircraft) we find a terminal velocity, from the 757's cruising altitude of 12km, of about 21.764 M/S. Now, how fast is the cruising speed of a 757?
Well, that would be 272.232 M/S. I imagine that a powered nosedive would be even faster. So that's 20 times the speed of a pieces of debris falling from an explosion. When comparing this to other crashes, you've got to remember that this isn't even similiar to the vast majority of other 'Controlled Flight Into Terrain' crashes. Those very rarely involve a full throttle head-on collision (it normally happens when the pilots misjudge the altitude somehow during landing).
Then again, I am not a professional forensic engineer with years of experience and detailed knowledge about air accidents. Though all those guys are pretty damn certain it crashed.
* Of course, NASA could be in on it, and their spy satellites could have read my mind to discern my purpose for using the calculator.
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Nah, Khar, you've made your point pretty well. I'm used to thinking about aircraft as big fucking metal things that intuitively should stick around in some vaguely recognizable physical form if they hit the ground going really fast.
Has anyone read the Garth Ennis Punisher MAX series of comic books? There's a storyline in it in which a single deep cover operative is privately contacted by a small group of high-ranking military officials and is instructed to use his undercover identity to organize a small terrorist cell under the pretense of attacking the West, so that these officials have the capacity to order a terrorist attack on a friendly target if it suits their purposes to do so. The character, of course, is unscrupulous enough to do so. I mean, it's a comic book, so it just ends with the Punisher killing everyone, but the concept seems reasonable to me.
There are any number of totally feasible ways in which the order to create a terrorist attack (put quotes around that if you want to) on the US could've come from very high up. And it doesn't seem like something that was just kind of waited for. It definitely served the purposes of the corporatocratic elite, that much is true. The idea that it happened without their influence and yet at precisely the right time to serve their purposes best strikes me as weird. It's like, yeah, it'd easy to believe that things just went wrong, and that's what allowed this to happen, but from some perspectives things went VERY right. If 9/11 hadn't advanced an agenda to the extent that it did, I wouldn't be suspicious.
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That's such a mindblowingly bad logical fallacy that it's literally causing me physical pain when I try to wrap my head around it.
The only tangible benefit anyone in the administration got were the corporations paid to go into Iraq. Iraq, not Afghanistan. If the US government's goal was to go into Iraq by constructing 9/11, why the fuck weren't the terrorists Iraqi?
Seriously, you're citing a comic book which was written based on 9/11 conspiracy theories to support your logic and it's driving me absolutely fucking bonkers.
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I don't mean to cite the comic book to "support" anything. It's a fiction story. It's just that as a story, it's reasonably feasible. I mean, it's pretty well known that small numbers of rich men have, in the past, used undercover agents to manipulate world events (CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt Jr., for example, engineered the coup d'etat in Iran that put the Shah in power in 1953, at the behest of British and American oil interests). It's not meant to support my logic in any rational way, only demonstrate what it might look like.
I think it's patently untrue that "the only tangible benefit to anyone in the administration were the corporations paid to go into Iraq." I mean, first off, those payments were obscenely large. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are approaching 1 trillion dollars. This money isn't just burning, it's going into people's pockets (like weapons manufacturers and anyone else contracted by the military in the defense budget ... the reconstruction contracts aren't the only way for US companies to make money on war). But we're also talking about military presence in the Middle East, army bases in the part of the world that is most likely to be important to the maintenance of a large military force over the next 50 years. That's a huge strategic advantage regardless of what said military forces are actually doing. We're also talking about the heroin trade in Afghanistan, which declined 94% in a single year after the Taliban banned the growing of opium poppies in 2000 ... when the US moved in and displaced the Taliban a year later, opium production went right back up again and Afghanistan was the top world supplier again almost immediately (it still is and production is only increasing). Someone's collecting that money, and given the CIA's track record with drug trafficking, it's not ridiculous to assume that US-related interests are getting a cut. We're also talking about the Patriot Act, which left the door open to a lot of really nasty possibilities when it came to getting rid of political enemies. We're also talking about the political approval rating of the administration, which skyrocketed immediately following 9/11 and was ultimately the basis for Bush's reelection platform.
(I should also mention that Iraq and Afghanistan are the two most important targets for anyone looking to mess with Iran, which has definitely been on the table in Washington for quite some time.)
The point here is that a state of war, not even necessarily a successful war, is in itself desirable to certain extremely powerful interests, and the process of developing a military presence in the Middle East that started in 2001 is not done yet. We didn't go into Afghanistan to look for Osama, we went in so that we'd have a place to shoot off expensive toys and gain the basis for further conquest of oil-rich countries (and maybe make a little drug money on the side, but that's secondary). We went into Iraq to make sure that anything profitable in that country (oil contracts, construction contracts, mercenary contracts, etc.) fell into the control of a US company ... and to shoot off expensive toys and gain the basis for further conquest of oil-rich countries. The amount of debt that the US taxpayers are in right now is just the icing on the cake.
America is an imperialist nation, and private interests, rather than governments, are the new paradigm for empire-building. This much is completely indisputable. If you look at the imperialist actions taken by this nation and its private interests since 9/11, I think it's pretty clear that the plans were in place before the attacks. The only question is whether or not the attacks were part of the plans, and I think that not only is this not an unreasonable question, but "yes" is not an unreasonable answer.
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only if the world is a tom clancy book
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America is an imperialist nation, and private interests, rather than governments, are the new paradigm for empire-building. This much is completely indisputable. If you look at the imperialist actions taken by this nation and its private interests since 9/11, I think it's pretty clear that the plans were in place before the attacks. The only question is whether or not the attacks were part of the plans, and I think that not only is this not an unreasonable question, but "yes" is not an unreasonable answer.
It's an unreasonable answer because it's not the right question to ask. It's a question that presumes individuals with power are villainous in a cartoonish way - consider that the scenario you've outlined is very close to that of an actual James Bond film, and not even a particularly good Bond film but the first cringeworthy Brosnan one. It's also a question that basically gives us an easy out. We just need to find these villainous men, root them out and punish them for what they've done to the innocent people of United 93, what they've done to the innocent people of Iraq and Afghanistan, what they've done to the people in America's military.
Without the simple binary of that question we're in murkier depths. Consider this for a second: if the answer to your question is "no" - and, besides the sheer logistics of such a conspiracy, the empirical evidence we have makes a pretty strong case that "no" is the correct answer - that doesn't change the fact that there are people who had a monetary interest in a war and who used 9/11 and the resulting international conflicts to essentially move product. These people watched the Twin Towers fall and, instead of tragedy, saw opportunity. They seized that opportunity, and they were rewarded for it. We have no laws, no rules, no structures in place to bring those people to justice because they committed no crime, they did no injustice. They simply achieved what our society regards as success.
It's uncomfortable to face this truth. It's way, way more uncomfortable to think about it than it is to think that some faceless group somewhere decided that someone was going to push a button and blow a plane full of innocent people out of the sky. It's much easier for us to punish the murder of our countrymen than it is for us to reconsider how our entire way of life can enable Blackwater.
But it's the real truth behind 9/11 - the greatest evils perpetrated in our lifetime may go unpunished simply because our society does not count them as evils. The only question we should be asking is, "How can this change?"
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the greatest evils perpetrated in our lifetime may go unpunished simply because our society does not count them as evils.
Did you come up with this line? Because it is amazing.
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all i'm gonna say is that's not the first draft of that post
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If you look at the imperialist actions taken by this nation and its private interests since 9/11, I think it's pretty clear that the plans were in place before the attacks.
I don't quite know what this means. I mean, if they really had planned ahead to that an extent, don't you think they might have managed not to utterly fuck up quite so much? On the other hand, you are aware that, at least historically, the US has made a point of planning to a limited extent for every war they might possibly be involved in?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Color-coded_War_Plans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Color-coded_War_Plans)
Given the fact that Afghanistan was already known to be harbouring anti-US groups and militants, and that they had already fought one war with Iraq a decade before and the same government was still in power, I think they probably certainly did plan the wars before 9/11. Just like they planned a war with Pakistan, or Suadi Arabia, or Nigeria, or Venezuala.
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Can you guys stop telling the truth that kind of prattle has absolutely no place in Truther discussion
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Just like they planned a war with Pakistan, or Suadi Arabia, or Nigeria, or Venezuala.
or canada
i wish we had an emoticon with a little tinfoil hat or something
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(http://www.gaijinside.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/vlcsnap-107457.png)
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(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_g7KcbMxmLEU/R5E2Yk_YZ4I/AAAAAAAADFY/_m0pJ7oocXI/s400/TinfoilHat.jpg)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_foil_hat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_foil_hat)
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But it's the real truth behind 9/11 - the greatest evils perpetrated in our lifetime may go unpunished simply because our society does not count them as evils. The only question we should be asking is, "How can this change?"
This post is dead on about a lot of things that I think are totally integral to this discussion, and I think it's addressing the fundamentally more important aspects of the issue, so I don't want to challenge you directly on anything you've said because I ultimately agree with it. But I don't think resemblance to schlocky fictions is necessarily a good reason to discount the idea that maybe there were rich white people who knew some terrorists were going to direct an attack on the US and were looking forward to the opportunity it would present, and that just maybe there were some white people who took part in making it happen. I don't think anything like that could be proven beyond reasonable doubt, nor do I think that any solution to the problems inherent in this issue would need that proof as a foundation (for the reasons you mentioned), so maybe that makes it irrelevant? I don't know.
Honestly, I find that what I'm trying to explain to people when I end up talking about 9/11 isn't related to the black-and-white, find-the-bad-guys-and-make-them-pay aspect of it. I make noise about 9/11 when I want people to understand that the society we've built actively rewards and encourages man's inhumanity to man. Most people can't really grasp this until they get broken out of the "us vs. them" mindset that 9/11 put our entire nation in, and questioning the idea that it's really "them" that we need to fight against is the only way to do it, all too often. I mean, I also believe that there are people out there who are consciously acting as forces of evil in the world, that the world really HAS produced such caricatures (Bond villain types), because it's big enough to do so and people can in fact be pushed to that extreme. But the more important questions, about the nature of a society that can create people like that, don't really allow that to be an "easy out." Bringing these people to justice doesn't actually fix anything.
I mean, if they really had planned ahead to that an extent, don't you think they might have managed not to utterly fuck up quite so much?
Our hypothetical Bond-villain 9/11 conspirators aren't necessarily the people who actually carried out the plan. They're just the ones who set it in motion. Once it gets out of a think-tank conference room and into the actual Iraqi and Afghani deserts, shit goes wrong and people make mistakes. But I think the decisions that were made happened in a premeditated sequence.
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Pat Buchanan did 9/11.
He is also a secret Jew and head of the international media conspiracy.
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Our hypothetical Bond-villain 9/11 conspirators aren't necessarily the people who actually carried out the plan. They're just the ones who set it in motion. Once it gets out of a think-tank conference room and into the actual Iraqi and Afghani deserts, shit goes wrong and people make mistakes. But I think the decisions that were made happened in a premeditated sequence.
Man you think they could have not delegated the part about making sure that the reason they said they were going to war was actually "true" (i.e; WMD's. Or the Baathist government being linked to Al-Quaida.)
white people
Is this relevant?
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You have to admit it's at the very least a good guess.
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I dunno I've got info that points conclusively to them being greenish-blue (http://truthism.com/)
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That site never gets old
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I make noise about 9/11 when I want people to understand that the society we've built actively rewards and encourages man's inhumanity to man.
it is possible to believe this without believing that george bush done nineeleven
in fact a cursory reading of the history of capitalism in its current form would show how good it is at responding to any contingency to make a buck off it
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Have you heard the word? (http://www.christopedia.us/Barack_Hussein_Obama)
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That really might be the most entertaining *pedia article I have ever read.
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Also (http://conservapedia.com/Obama)
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For the record our own Johnny C edited the article I linked and made it not egregiously racist.
Except for the part about his celebration of "Kill Whitey Day" as a child, because he missed that. Or it's the truth. Whichever.
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Fuckin' buzz kill!
(I hate that I can no longer sign into meebo!)
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(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_g7KcbMxmLEU/R5E2Yk_YZ4I/AAAAAAAADFY/_m0pJ7oocXI/s400/TinfoilHat.jpg)
that needs to be an avatar! its awesome!